Microsoft has been very protective over its OEM pricing, and while various figures float around the web, the company has never really confirmed or denied any of them. At the Jefferies Annual Technology Conference, however, Charles Songhurst, general manager of Corporate Strategy, revealed some of the pricing details for OEMs.

At first that does not sound like much, but when you consider to what length OEMs go to replace parts for other parts that cost like 5 cent less it is enormous.

With the new ARM 2GHz Cortex A9 coming I can see a net centric future were Linux (ChromeOS maybe) will be here to stay on devices.

And sometimes the decisions are based purely on stupidity too - case in point, why do all the Netbooks either come with Atheros or Broadcom wireless? why isn't there a complete Intel solution which includes Intel wireless which has the best support across the board when it comes to drivers and reliability? What I'd like to see from Intel is them pushing complete Intel solutions (chipset, graphics, wireless, ethernet, processor etc) to OEMs.

Maybe when it is Intel everything then Linux on the netbook will become viable - because right now the ath5k/ath9k are crap and the developers haven't done a single damn thing in the last year to bring it to the same level of feature completeness as the old proprietary hybrid driver.